Ordinary Characters

Ordinary characters consist of all printable and non-printable characters that are not explicitly designated as metacharacters. This includes all uppercase and lowercase alphabetic characters, all digits, all punctuation marks, and some symbols.

The simplest form of a regular expression is a single, ordinary character that matches itself in a searched string. For example, a single-character pattern, such as A, matches the letter A wherever it appears in the searched string. Here are some examples of single-character regular expression patterns: